'Life of Pi' is visually jaw-dropping

Updated 5:41 pm, Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) and a fierce Bengal tiger named Richard Parker must rely on each other to survive an epic journey.

Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) and a fierce Bengal tiger named Richard Parker must rely on each other to survive an epic journey.

Photo: McClatchey-Tribune News Service

'Life of Pi' is visually jaw-dropping

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3-D has become popular faster than filmmakers have figured out how to use it, and so advances in the artistry of 3-D are taking place, movie by movie. Last year, Martin Scorsese showed how 3-D could be beautiful, not just kinetic, in "Hugo," and now Ang Lee has made the most visually stunning 3-D film yet, with "Life of Pi."

That just about defines the entire value of "Life of Pi," and it's probably the only thing it will be remembered for. Otherwise, "Life of Pi" is not nearly as successful: It has the obviousness of a parable but none of the succinctness. It is a slow-moving fable, with enough story and substance to make for one amazing IMAX short. Instead the material is stretched beyond its limits into a long, repetitive and often stagnant 127-minute feature film.

Too bad, but first let's talk about the animals. "Life of Pi," based on Yann Martel's novel, is framed as the recollection of a man whose father was a zookeeper in India, and over the opening credits, the camera takes us inside that zoo. One of the striking aspects of 3-D is the way it gives us bodies in space. We can see what actors really look like, and, in the case of animals, we can see details of their bodies and their movements that somehow elude the usual two-dimensional process. It's simply gorgeous and fascinating to watch a succession of elephants, zebras and giraffes. Had Lee chosen to linger in this zoo for a half-hour, few in the audience would complain.

Writer calls

Alas, we can't stay in the zoo. We must return to modern-day Canada, where the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) is greeting a stranger into his home, a writer who has wanted to meet him.

As played by Rafe Spall, the writer is shy, tentative and weird - with the demeanor of an ineffectual serial killer, if such a thing can be imagined - and he has arrived because he has heard that Pi has a great story. As in, a story that will cause the writer to believe in the existence of God.

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Right away, "Life of Pi" grounds itself on loose soil. Why would Pi want to talk to this guy? OK, maybe he would. Anything's possible. Better question: Why would anyone in the audience want to listen? The movie doesn't give us a single reason to care about the writer's spiritual quest, nor does it in any way establish Pi as someone worthy of our attention. For the first half-hour, we see flashbacks to Pi's early life, and nothing in it is remarkable. As far as anyone watching is concerned, some random guy is telling us his life story in painstaking detail. Our pain, his detail.

Things finally kick into gear when Pi's family decides to move to Canada, taking all their animals with them aboard a passenger ship. Suddenly, there is a terrible storm, and Pi ends up on a life raft with several animals, including, most notably, a Bengal tiger. Easily two-thirds of "Life of Pi" takes place on that life boat, as Pi tries to negotiate his relationship with an irritable and very hungry carnivore. It's an evolving relationship but one without much in the way of nuance, and so for more than an hour, the movie floats in place.

Visually pleasing

There are compensations - a magnificent night sky, the vast expanse of water and an island filled with nothing but meerkats. Meerkats are wonderful creatures, tiny, busy and watchful, with a tendency to stand upright and with a perpetually stern expression that makes them look very concerned and extremely silly. It's a pleasure to see them in 3-D.

There are other pleasures like that in "Life of Pi," all of them incidental, all of them adding up to a movie that can't be dismissed, because there is too much in it, but it can't be embrace, because it's all spread too thin.